The GQ+A: Dane Cook on His Haters, Regrets, and What Therapy Taught Him

Dane Cook has a new standup special, Troublemaker, airing on Showtime this Friday. There are some funny jokes! And some unfunny jokes! Though nothing deserving of the outsized rage torch so-called comedy purists seem to hold for the guy. My second Google suggestion upon typing the words "Dane Cook" is "classic douchebag." (The first? "Misogynist.") How did this happen? And more importantly:_ is it fair_? Dane Cook and I investigate this matter, and in the process I learn that he’s actually a pretty insightful "brah."*

*"Brah" is merely my preconceived notion about the type of vernacular Dane Cook uses. The truth is he did not say "brah" during the course of this interview. I maybe have never heard him say "brah." Everything I thought I knew about Dane Cook could be wrong. I am basically Javert at the end of Les Misérables_, okay?_

**GQ: A big promise in the beginning of Troublemaker is this joke that you’re going to get a couple to break up by the end of night—has that happened? **

Dane Cook: I had a couple about six months ago at the Laugh Factory here in Hollywood, I’m doing the material and I start talking to this couple in the front. Just from the vibes that I’m getting from talking to the guy, I’m like, This relationship is over, okay? It’s not... it doesn’t even exist any longer, and I’m gonna tell you right now why. Well fifteen minutes later, I turn: they’re gone. I don’t know if they’re both in the bathroom, whatever. But then a guy walks into the room, and he’s like, "Hey Dane!" Just interrupts my set. He goes, "You know that couple? I was just outside smoking a cigarette...They just broke up, got into a huge screaming match, about all the things you said about checking his cell phone!" That was kind of cool.

**There’s a moment in the special where you handle a heckler so deftly. Does that come from practice? **

It probably comes from a fear of getting beaten down publicly._ [Laughs.]_ I’m sure a lot of it is just kind of that gladiator element that goes into comic versus heckler. You’re illuminated up there on stage. alone in front of everybody, and that guy’s just somewhere out there. I can’t read him. I can’t look him in the eye. I don’t know what I’m really dealing with. It’s an interesting dichotomy, and a lot of times for me, I like to come at that heckler moment trying to have a real understanding of why that person felt the need to rip something out at that time. Granted, a lot of times alcohol is a factor. But to me it’s more interesting when somebody yells out, and you sense that this isn’t just a person wanting to get me riled up. This is really somebody who either needs attention or doesn’t like the fact that somebody else is being engaging. You still want to, you know, bludgeon them, so to speak, because they’ve chosen to put themselves on the guillotine on display for everyone.

**But there is a certain sense among people who consider themselves "real comedy fans" that you are a person that should be disliked. **

_[Laughs.] _I kind of like it. Why do I like that? I do think it’s a defense mechanism. If comics didn’t want to be loved we wouldn’t be up there. That’s part of why we’re up there. There’s something missing. There’s a void. As a great acting teacher, Larry Moss, once told me: "Stop trying to fill that hole. You gotta own it, show people the hole." So I think that sometimes comedy purists—whatever the hell that really means—I think they think that you’re supposed to be in a great deal of pain and you’re supposed to have your head down and kind of always be on the cusp of disaster. For whatever reason they think that comedy has to be more pain-based, and that’s not my persona. But I like detractors. I like hater culture.

Do you feel like you have to fight back?

I’ve always engaged it by not. In other words, I never really fought back or called morning DJs who were flip-flopping on me. I just kind of absorbed it. It was about eight years ago when I got to the point where I felt like, All right, well, I’ve hit an upper-echelon here, I’m sure that any minute now I’m gonna get a machete to the knees. I prepared my family. I had read enough memoirs and knew the rigmarole. I never liked when it hurt the fans though. I never liked when any kind of crap or allegations that people started to believe got to them. I never enjoyed the fact that they could be made to feel bad for liking me. That sucked. But for me personally it was like, Man, for a kid from Arlington, Mass., who was so introverted growing up and never thought the word "controversial" would be anywhere near me, to have that and to be discussed is enough. People either defending me or going off on why they think I’m terrible when it’s just jokes in the end—just jokes!—I always sat back and let those things happen. I guess maybe it felt like I was never gonna be milquetoast as long as somebody was debating me.

Last summer a Splitslider article defended your comedy rather nicely, but it began: "I don’t hate Dane Cook. I know I should." Where does that expectation come from?

I don’t know, but I’ve said the same thing about myself, so I’ve had those mornings too. Where does it come from? It’s tough to answer that question, because this is always one of those places where you paint yourself in a corner. Everybody has their reasons for not appreciating a certain person’s talent, and sometimes those reasons are valid, and truly that person just doesn’t care for what you do, and it irks them. And that’s valid. That’s great, even. That’s the American way. And then sometimes there’s other motives that make a person want to tear you down, ones that have more to do with how they feel about themselves.

I’ve taken enough therapy in my life, read enough memoirs, had enough monsoon moments where I realized that the best moments in my life came on the heels of some—I don’t want to say dark—very trying times. Something was scaring me personally or professionally in some way. So, yeah, you look ahead, and go, Ah, I hope I don’t have too many more of those, but then sometimes it gives you that incentive, that fervor to wanna do a little bit more. It kind of brings the best out of you. So haters keep kicking my ass forward. Fans embrace me at the end of the day and give me that great, great support. But, you know, Troublemaker is for everybody. It’s for everybody to have an opinion on.

Photo: Nick Spanos/Courtesy of Showtime

The word most lobbed at you online is "douchebag."

It definitely doesn’t hurt. It’s not hurtful. You’re not gonna watch Real Time with Bill Maher and have a senator be like, "This douchebaggery that we are dealing with..." That word just doesn’t have that same pang that it did when it first came out. Actually when it first came out it was just gross. It was kind of like "Eughh!" It was not so much that you were an arrogant self-centered dude, but it was more just, "You know you’re just gross, you’re stinky." It was so Shakespearean. But now were at the point where guys will call themselves douchebags. They’re like, "Aw man, I’m being such a douchebag." You know, "That’s so douchey." And it’s got different spinoffs now. I made a joke a couple of years ago, about all the different douche containers: You can be a douche silo; you could be a douche space shuttle. What will it be in ten years? I’m interested to see what douchebag will evolve into.

Y****ou have a joke in Troublemaker, about sleeping with a girl who confesses she was just a one-year-old when you graduated high school. Are you pulling a McConaughey in Dazed and Confused phase, where you get older, and they stay the same age?

I got out of a relationship with a woman that was, you know, around my age, and then decided, You know what? I’m gonna have some fun. So I met this girl who was, you know, much younger, and she asked me what my favorite music was. I said, "Aw, I love Nirvana. ’Smells like Teen Spirit’—still one of my favorite songs." And she was like, "Oh that song came out the year I was born." I was like, "That song came out the year I graduated high school." And it was in that very moment where I realized, Wow! Yeah! This is it, I am getting older. Everything up until that moment was still, Naw, I can hang with a twenty-one-year-old. I’m zip lining, I’m like in the peak physical condition. I don’t drink. I don’t smoke. And then I had the daunting realization that conversations are gonna get a little bit more difficult unless I date somebody who’s been cryogenically frozen. Maybe the comedian in me knew, also, that there was probably a wealth of material to figure out from dating younger.

That feels very in line with a Lena Dunham philosophy: "This might turn out mortifying in some way, but there could be a good story in the end."

She’s a great example. Not only do I love what she’s done, but what really speaks to me about her is how much she shows her vulnerability. You start comedy, and you think, Oh no, this has to be the furthest thing from personal. It has to be what you think is funny. I need to find out what is gonna make you crack up. But then, as time went by I started to understand, sometimes by happenstance, that the places where people were staying with me and connecting to me the most was in those brief kernels where I talked about the deeply personal stuff—like, trying to delete my mom’s cell phone number after she passed away of cancer and not being able to delete the number. I probably hear from somebody once a week who says, "Because of that bit, when I finally had to delete my mom or my aunt or my sister’s number, I laughed because I thought about you doing that routine." Which is just so great. I get to be irreverent and twisted and silly, but I can still show as much of heart as I want to up there. People aren’t gonna run away going, "He was serious, man!"

Favorite joke on the special?

Oh, man. I don’t know. You know which one I like? I really enjoyed my bit right near the very beginning about why we men put our arm around our girl. It’s not because we suddenly feel affection it’s because we’re steering you. And it’s dead-true. And I remember the minute I realized it—I was with my girl at the time and I had my arm around her and was walking her through a very busy outdoor mall, I realized, Yeah, I’m not protecting her. I just don’t want to walk slow with this chick. And the very first night I did that bit, the very first night, every guy there was like, "HA HA." Like, "Yeah, you’re onto me." And then girls were like, "I knew it!" And then girls of course turn to their guy and go, "Are you steering me? Am I being steered?"

Where do you write your material?

I go to the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro, and align my chakras with Jupiter. No, what do I do? I live life.

**In the last couple of years there’s been a bajillion big controversies in comedy. Rape jokes are being called out on the Internet. There’s a feeling that you could say the wrong thing. Is that something that you’re thinking about when you’re writing these days? **

Uh, no. No, no. You don’t want to be in your head too much censoring yourself. That comedy club, that’s the place where you’re in quarantine. You come into that room, anything is on-limits. And it’s unfortunate when sometimes things get recorded or put up. I made a comment a couple of years back—I think it was about the Aurora shooting about a week after, and, man, that wasn’t meant to be shared on CNN. This was meant to be shared with fifty people that, after talking to me for fifteen minutes, were feeling what I was feeling, and there was a way to express it. Hearing just a fragment of it, yeah, I looked like an asshole. But that wasn’t my intention, I would certainly never want to hurt people in a callous manner. You know, I did a rape joke a couple of years ago, and it was basically saying how the word was overused. I feel like the word needs its power. We need to remember what that word means. The routine was me saying, you know, when you’re on ox and you’ve got the headphones on, and everybody’s saying, "Aw man, you got me dude, you shot me. Dude you raped me!" And then finally I said, "I’m pretty sure if I talked to a woman who’s been through the horrific situation, and I asked her, ’What was it like to have been raped?’ she’s not going to say, ’Have you ever played Halo?’" I really wish people would respect that more. I wanted to be able to do a bit that wasn’t just for shock-value, but actually had some pulp to it. It’s not my job. I’m not educating. I’m not there to do anything other than find laughs, yet when you do it in a way that’s a different perspective than what you would typically say, that’s always a nice feeling as a performer. It makes you feel like you’re actually growing and learning from stuff up there.

**Ever been made to regret a joke you’ve delivered onstage? **

Maybe. I mean I’m sure I’ve had moments, especially early on, where I probably just said something not having the brain power to think, Ah, that’s, you know, that’s not appropriate for this particular venue. I don’t ever remember beating myself up about it. I do subscribe to the philosophy that comedy should be unapologetic. I’m in that workspace, doing exactly what our rights preserve, in the very last place that you can get complete freedom of speech. The last place. You can’t get it from TV. You can’t get it from a magazine. Even podcasts, it’s like, you might have a sponsor. But you can walk into a comedy club, and you can hear 100-percent unadulterated real truth, no standards of practice, no editor, from my brain to your ears. That should not be something that people need to apologize for. Apologize to yourself for walking in that room paying a ticket for and sitting down knowing, Hey! I’m in the place where anything and everything is up for grabs. So you take it personally? You should be sorry for yourself.